“I’ll send Ah Wong to you,” was the grudging reply, and Robert Gregory shuffled awkwardly from the room. He did not even look at Wu again—and Wu barely looked at him.
“And who is Ah Wong, Mrs. Gregory?” Wu asked amiably, as the door closed.
“My servant,” she told him.
“Your amah? But I do not need an interpreter,” he laughed.
“She rarely leaves me.”
“Who could?” he said with a little bow.
Ah Wong came noiselessly into the room.
“And now, Mr. Wu,” the woman asked earnestly, her voice low and tense, “will you help us?”
“You, if I can—but—I am not sure if——” He broke off and gave Mrs. Gregory a little inquiring gesture that said, “Are you going to let her stand there?” For Ah Wong had come steadily across the room until she stood quite at his elbow.
“Wait, Ah Wong,” her mistress told her, with a gesture of the head towards the door. And Ah Wong moved back as quietly as she had come, and waited just inside the door, immovable, expressionless. But not for an instant, never once, did her eyes leave Wu Li Chang. A critic at a “first night” could not have watched and listened more closely or seemed less interested.